Problem Statement

Passage Give people power and discretion, and whether they are grand viziers or border guards, some will use their position to enrich themselves. The problem can be big enough to hold back a country's development. For most people in the world, though, the worry is not that corruption may slow down their country's GDP growth. It is that their daily lives are pervaded by endless hassles, big and small. And for all the evidence that some cultures suffer endemic corruption while others are relatively clean, attitudes toward corruption, and even the language describing bribery, is remarkably similar around the world. In a testament to most people's basic decency, bribe-takers and bribe-payers have developed an elaborate theatre of dissimulation. This is not just to avoid detection. Even in countries where corruption is so common as to be unremarkable and unprosecutable, and even when the transaction happens far from snooping eyes, a bribe is almost always dressed up as some other kind of ex